Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1887-03-03

ments into an organic seed could collect
them in an hour, or perhaps a few min
utes, and arrive at the same result by
combining them organically. This have
done. | first find out what a particular
kind of food Is made of. There are sixty
five simple elements in nature: that is.
substances which We call simple elements,
because we have not yet succeed in prov
| ing them to be compound. I am afraid
your readers viii not generally understand
what l am going to say. If you use it be
careful to take it down verbatim.
.'There are sixty-five elements. Car
bon is the king of these. 1t is the great
organizer. It is never absent from any
plant or animal organism. 1t is at the
base of almost everything. 1t is the kew
to my discovery, for it possesses the pc
culiar capacity to form molecules from its
own atoms. The diamond is pure carbon.
SO are graphite and charcoal nearly pure
carbon, though they are different. Sugar
and starch belong to the hydrocarbons,
and can not understand why their man
ufacture out of earth and water hasn't
been hit on before. / form all nv meat
compounds by exposing three elements
IN red-hot state to nitrogen gas, though
! use different fiavors, which I get from
the earth, too. | have had to bring from
Westchester county some argillaceous soil
not found here.
Il can make wine, and have made il.
with New Jersey earth and water that no
man can tell from Chateau Youem.
lind that those elements combine at the
lowest temperature that have the same
atomlclty-that is, the same bonds bv
which they unite with one another or with
compound molecules. This great inven-
tIon has not been shit on before because
analytic chemistry has received too much
attention to the exclusion of synthetic
chemistry; men have been more devoted
to learning than to doing. Lavois1er was
just on the edge of it and missed Sir
Humphrey Davy, Liebig, and Faraday
were all in sight of it and suddenly turned
aside. They succeeded in making urea
out of the elements and several other in
organic substances, but they stopped
at that. They overlooked the sim plicity of
this thing.
Il think that after two Or three years
New Workers, for instance, will no longer
eat meat or vegetables. They will not
send to the tropics for fruits, or to Europe
for wines, because the head of every fam
lily, by turning a crank, (or, perhaps.
without turning crank, if clock appa-
ratus is attached), can produce more de-
licious fruits and wines at tenth of the
cost.
'Sir Isaac Newton said: ''The' proper
ties of all food ara in the dirt under our
feet and in the air over our heads-but
they elude our grasp [ was led on by
Dalton's great discovery of the law of
multiple proportions. that the atomatis
weight of compounds is the same as the
atomic weight of their ingredients. I
was helped also by the well. known law of
ismorphism, that certain groups of sub
stunces exist, any member of which can
be replaced by any other member of
equivalent proportions without changing
the crystalline character of the matter.
The extraordinary analogy between
homologus groups ST organic compounds
and certain small groups of the elements,
as chlorin, bromine and iodine, have
been remarked by many chemists. Not
only isolated triads, but all the series ex-
pressed by the general formula of AxNb,
However this is beyond the average reader
and will hardly be intelligible
mo change OF food is contem plated.
Every man can have food of the kind to
which he is accustomed, or which he pre-
fers.
It will be as easy to produce cabbage as
oranges, and pork as cartridges. We
shall actually produce these very things,
but in a new form. It will be cabbages
and oranges that have never felt the
wind and rain, and pork and partridges
that have never been alive. We merely
take short cut and snatch the food from
the earth without giving it the trouble of
growing. 1t will lack fiber, which is the
only perceptible difference.
The equivalent value of an element is
now measured by the number of atoms
a monatomic or equivalent element with
which it will combine. 1t is known, fer
instance, that chloride combines with one
atom of hydrogen, oxygen with two, nj
trogen with three, carbon with four and
so on.
I have struck some astonishing exam
pies of allathrophism-tha is the produc
ton of entirely dissimilar compounds
from nearly similar elements. For in
stance make bananas and chocolate out
of the very same ingredients and the
methods of combining them differs only
trife.